How about a True Green Drive?

the current Green:a> lower Power usage is niceb> head retractor is nicec> lower RPM is niced> larger Cache is nice (AFDs only)

We're still missing one thing:a 75 - 100 year MTBF and a 35 year warranty, (yes I did say thirty-five)that would make a True Green drive, because then hundreds of thousands of HDD'swouldn't be going into the dump every yearand people would be upgrading due to needing / wanting more space,not because the drive bombed out after only a couple of years or days in some casesas two of my caviar blue drives did recently both with less than 1,000 POH, 1× 40GB & 1× 80GB

The industry has decades of research available so I beleive it can be doneand creating a drive that would outlast me would truly be a Greener driveand I'm not talking about using SSD flash I'm talking about better components all around

so that's my "Product Idea"and I wouldn't hesitate to drop $400.00 - $500.00 on a drive that I "know" will be around as long as meand if it isn't there's still available warranty period.

Well, WD will sell you a drive with a 136-year MTBF right now. The entire RE series is listed as having a MTBF of 1.2 million hours, which if you do the math is about 136 years.

So there you go, buy one of those. The warranty is only 1/7 of your request, and the price is a little cheaper, but hey, you're in business.

In reality, of course, MTBF does not correlate to real-world lifespan in real-world use, since by necessity it's determined through accelerated testing. But at least in as much as accelerated test methods allow, you can buy a 100-year drive today. Of course, even if that were correct, the chances of any other component in the computer using it surviving even 1/10 that long are pretty slim. I expect were you to be able to buy a computer that'd last 35 years today it's unlikely you'd actually want to use it in 35 years. Not that growth hasn't leveled off somewhat, but I don't see many 1985-era computers in use today, and I can buy a phone roughly comparable to a 10-year-old desktop now.

Actually, if you go buy one of the Sandforce-based SSDs from OWC, they have a 10 million hour MTBF, which is 1141 years. Which, if true, would mean that had such drives been available in the middle ages, half of the drives manufactured in the year 868 would still be running. Which would be cool, but I'm skeptical you'd want to use a millennium-old computer.